Russia should acknowledge the wrongs of the Soviet Union

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George Feifer, special for Russia Now

3:06PM GMT 03 Dec 2009

Loudmouth that I am, I've been asked to lower my volume more often than I care to remember, but one instance isn't easily forgotten. It took place in a crowded Bratislava café. I was seeing a Slovak journalist who'd recently spent several hours with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, although that detail is irrelevant here. What is relevant is that this was October, 1968, and we were talking, I with my usual boom, in Russian, our common language. "Please," my friend pleaded. "Please keep your voice down." The recent Soviet strangulation of Socialism with a Human Face, the Prague Spring, had caused many Slovaks as well as most Czechs to detest the Russian language, all the more because they were compelled to learn it in school.

Incidentally, about 1968, an anecdote briefly popular under Gorbachev would mock the Kremlin for crushing what was probably the last possible attempt to make socialism work. Question: what's the difference between Socialism with a Human Face and perestroika? Answer: Let me think… ah… um… 19 years." But national folly that reaps the opposite of national aims is another story, far from exclusively Russian.

As for the Soviet Union and its neighbours, I learnt only later some of the gruesome particulars of the even more savage repression of the Baltic countries that began in 1939 and resumed after the Second World War: the crippling of the Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian intelligentsia and rupture of countless families by sending "enemies of socialism" into exile where hundreds of thousands of deaths were inevitable. Few residents of those countries did not suffer, many grievously, under the occupation by the Red Army that, using Gulags and murder in the service of Sovietisation, sought to suffocate genuine national instincts and identity.

Today's Russians have reason to resent Europe's failure to express fitting gratitude for the chiefly Soviet victory in the Second World War that saved the continent from unimaginable pain and degradation. That may well apply especially to Eastern Europe, which was already under occupation.

At the same time, living Russians, still misled as they are by the current Kremlin's insistence on twisting history, know too little about why Eastern Europeans feared the Red Army's advance on its way to Berlin. They feared and loathed it for what the Soviet Union already did to their countries before Hitler's armies had swallowed them. They hated it with sustained passion during the 46-year postwar occupation that sometimes eased somewhat but ended only with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

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That repression is undeniable. The briefest visit to former Soviet satellite countries confirms that the tricky questions Russian officials attempt to pose about who was responsible for not preventing or stopping Hitler's eastward march only make things worse. Real life – a term much liked by Soviet propagandists – gave the overwhelming majorities of their populations a profoundly unhappy memory of the supposed fraternal relations with the Soviet Union and a matchingly powerful wish to be protected against possible future Russian domination.

Why doesn't Moscow acknowledge the old injustices? Instead of trying to justify Soviet wrongs all these years later, why doesn't it apologise, as Germany has for its 20th-century atrocities? Can't it see that would help improve its relations with the Eastern European countries that sometimes rub in the salt by talking more about the Soviet crimes than the Nazi ones – not only because the Soviet ones were more recent but because Germany has admitted, and to a degree atoned for, its behaviour under Hitler?

Maybe too little time has passed. The real German apologies came only with the late-Sixties youth whose various revolutions included challenging earlier generations. Before that, "where were you during the war, Papa?" was virtually never asked because people didn't want to know; therefore, the crimes were almost never mentioned. Besides, Germany is almost alone in trying to deal honestly with the outrages of its past. America hasn't followed, let alone led, so who am I, born there, to advise Russians to apologise? Will we ever properly do that for our treatment of our African slaves and Native Americans?

Still, if Moscow would like to swallow hard and follow the German example that made possible genuine reconciliation, little time remains. The real reckoning with the truth of Germany's terrible past that marked the country's return to higher civilisation began some 25 years after the Third Reich crumbled. The Russian Federation replaced the Russian Republic of the USSR roughly 20 years ago, since when we've heard only self-serving justification rather than apology. How good if President Dmitry Medvedev's very recent urging to remember Stalin's purges were a start, even though he, as usual, spoke only of Russian victims.

George Feifer wrote Message From Moscow in 1968. His latest book is Breaking Open Japan